This section introduces aspects that may be helpful in facilitating a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
In some known location based networks (LBNs), collection of venue datasets are collected by traversing the entire network of a geographic region (e.g., performing an exhaustive search) to retrieve venue data such as users' friendship relations and venue checkins. In other known LBNs, collection of venue datasets are performed using sampling algorithms such as random walk or breath first search.